Night of the Demons (remake) (V)

Director Adam Gierasch (Autopsy) returns with his sophomore effort Night of the Demons, based on the classic 1988 Kevin Tenney flick of the same name, which itself spawned two sequels. The new film follows the same structure as the original: a group of party-going friends face a night in hell on earth as they try to defend themselves against an onslaught of demons intent on possessing their bodies and souls – however this time the ‘demon party’ is at Broussard Mansion not Hull [Hell] House. When cops bust a party thrown by Angela (Elizabeth) at Broussard Mansion, she and a handful of party goers – Maddie (Keena), Suzanne (Luther), Lily (Baird), Jason (Beach), Dex (Copon), along with small-time drug dealer Colin (Furlong) – hold out in the basement, where they find a hidden room containing six skeletal corpses. When Angela attempts to remove a gold tooth from one of bodies she gets bitten and is transformed into a demon. Then all hell literally breaks loose…

Gierasch announced prior to the screening of Night of the Demons at FrightFest that for this film he wanted to make a punk rock horror flick and the type of movie he wanted to see when he was 15, featuring copious amounts of blood, gore and nudity and he succeeds, even if it is at the expense of character development. But when you have such eye-candy as Monica Keena, Diora Baird and Bobbi Sue Luther (and her ample charms) character development is not something you need to worry about. It’s not like the cast and crew don’t know what they’re working with – yes the characters are one-dimensional but everyone manages to have fun with it, even Edward Furlong, who seems to be having so much fun that he brings more to his role in Demons than he has done in his previous movies.

Night of the Demons is a throwback to simpler times when boobs and blood were the norm, and special effects guys ruled the genre. As such, the film doesn’t scrimp on the physical FX – it features a plenty of gore and grue, including a gruesome face and boob ripping, demonic transformations (including one that takes place via some kinky demon anal sex) and a rehash of the original film’s lipstick in boob scene taken to an even more extreme and twisted level! This film isn’t your typical by-the-numbers rehash, Adam Gierasch throws in some nice directorial touches including a sepia-toned silent movie style opening flashback and a fast-paced in your face punk rock attitude that helps the film rise above many of today’s remakes.

Night of the Demons is a loud, brash, sexy and gory movie that recalls the best of 80s horror and kudos to Gierasch for including a cameo from the original film’s star Linnea Quigley!

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Mercurio Osterman

Did we see the same film? This film was as uninspired as they come, feeling very much like a number of generic 90s Scream knock off horror films with slightly higher gore count than is typical of that pg-13 horror.

Yes, paper thin characters, but that is only scratching the surface of bad in this film. The entire first 40 minutes would be better not existing at all, from the party set up, to the bland characters, to the ‘fast forward’ editing, none of it is worth wasting time on. The film picks up once all that intro stuff is discarded and it can just start throwing things at the screen and seeing what hits… but even on that level, the film is one bland sequence after another. Even the nudity factor, so prevalent in the previous films, seemed a bit on the light side (the strip club sequence was sooo shoehorned in to try to make up for this).

Wow, I’ve never seen Edward Furlong look so washed up and worn out.

Don’t get me wrong… it’s not like this film had much to live up to, with the acting and writing of the original being quite bad, but there was just so much unnecessary filler in this one. And so much feels like like I’ve seen it before, except done better, between Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films, etc, and even the 2nd Night of the Demons film.

I recently gave all the films a watch, ending with the remake, and while it is not as bad as some of the remakes nowadays (Nightmare on Elm Street, or Fright Night 2 [a sequel to the remake, which was actually another remake of the first Fright Night.], but so much worse than others, such as the first Fright Night Remake or the Evil Dead remake.